CRUEL/CRUEL

With glorious music, Dior J. Stephens’ CRUEL/CRUEL explores how societal expectations obstruct true connection and intimacy. Stephens, an expert in energetic wordplay, writes so that each poem is also a performance—something to be experienced within the body, a secret to be shared between friends. And I felt myself leaning in, feeling this speaker’s plight for love and acceptance, found myself also asking, “and / don’t i croon for you, like / so?”

CRUEL/CRUEL peels the plastic cover off the good couch and relishes in the lush sonic textures and linguistic dexterity of the lyric. Dior J. Stephens exudes a finesse to language and experimentalism as a site for re-imagination, for “STILL, there’s a hope in the wind that slants pessimism.” Stephens is the “dolphin in a mask in a mask in plain view,” inventive, playful, and spiritually cognizant to manifest for Black, queer voices toward radiant futures.

Dior J. Stephens knows the body is a reluctant archive. Stephens tends to traces of the everyday, knotting them into memory to patch a self frayed and fuming under the gaze of white heteropatriarchy. Yet, Stephens tracks how we buckle with pleasure. To read this book is to slink into a plum-black night where we hear “the ghost rivers of Harlem play / light patches / in your good ear.” Listen.